Google Chrome to block annoying ads

Google's Chrome browser
will soon come with preinstalled technology that will block the most annoying
ads currently marring the web experience, the company confirmed on Thursday.

Publishers will be able to
understand how they will be affected through a tool Google is dubbing "The
Ad Experience Report." It will basically score a publisher's site and
inform them which of their ads are "annoying experiences."

At the same time, Chrome
will give publishers the option to force a choice on people running their own
ad blocking software: whitelist the site so its non-annoying ads can display or
pay a small fee to access the content ad-free.

The moves, which had been
anticipated since word got out in April but hadn't been previously confirmed by
Google, will impact the entire advertising ecosystem because Chrome is the most
popular web browser for both desktop and mobile.

"We've all known for
a while that the ad experience is a real problem, and that it's confused and
angered users," Sridhar Ramaswamy, senior VP of ads and commerce at
Google, told Ad Age. "We realized solutions like ad blockers punish
everybody, including publishers who develop great content and are thoughtful
about the ad experience they put on their site."

Google isn't calling its
technology an ad blocker, instead classifying it as a "filter" that
removes the ads that consumers hate most. These include popups, ads that flash
quickly, change colors or force people to wait 10 seconds before accessing
content on a publisher's page.

The effort to install such
software on Chrome is a result of work by the Coalition for Better Ads, whose
members include Google, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, WPP's GroupM, Facebook,
Thomson Reuters, The Washington Post as well as the Interactive Advertising
Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers.

In an effort to develop a
Better Ads Standard and slow the spread of ad-blocking software, the Coalition
set out to determine which ad formats were most at fault. It paid some 25,000
study participants in the U.S. and Europe to rate 104 different ad experiences
on desktop and mobile. Chrome's "filter" is informed partly by the
results.

The industry is
particularly eager to keep ad blocking from taking off on mobile devices, where
it has a 1% adoption rate, the way it already has on desktop computers, where the
figure is 18%, according to Mary Meeker's 2017 Internet Trends report.

"We think getting ads
right is really, really important to the future for the internet. We love the
sources of information that makes the internet great," Ramaswamy said.
"What's scary is ad blocking has been a big problem on desktop and has
been a big problem for the last few years."

"Hopefully leading to
a much better, much stable ecosystem for everybody," he added. "We
are very excited about what we're announcing and doing here."

The option for publishers
to charge for ad-free access is called Funding Choices.

"We want to provide
consumers with choice," Scott Spencer, director of product management at
Google, told Ad Age. "The publisher will get compensated either way and it
will help explain to the consumer the value of advertising."

Users who opt to shell out
to avoid ads will pay with their Google Play account, Spencer said.